Larry Lessig on Searching Creative Commons
From time to time we’ve invited guest bloggers to write on the
Yahoo! Search blog. Today we have a post from
at Stanford Law School and well known expert on intellectual property
law in the digital world.
Larry also chairs the
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers flexible
copyright protections for creative works. Today we’ve launched a
Commons at
complements their
goal is to make it easier to locate Creative Commons licensed content
anywhere on the Web. So you can now look specifically for works that
you can modify, adapt, build upon, or even reuse for commercial
purposes–right on Yahoo! Search. (It’s also available via our
API, as noted on the YSDN blog.)
So we asked Larry if he could spare a few minutes of his busy
schedule to talk about the launch and the growth of the Creative
Commons.
I’m just about to get on a plane to return from South Korea, where
CC-Korea just
launched. This is about the tenth such launch I’ve seen, and each has
been more amazing than the last. Korea is a frantically focused net
culture, with the biggest penetration of broadband of any country in
the world. It was also the first country where the Internet really
mattered to the election of a president (in 2002, mobile phones and
internet chat are widely considered to have been responsible for a
last minute surge in youth vote, leading to the president’s
election).
At the end of our final celebratory dinner, one of the judges who
had helped launch CC-Korea asked me, “so what will make CC in the
world as successful as CC-Korea?” And I recognized, for the first
time, that this project that we started two and a half years ago had
finally left home. I was no longer asking others to help; others were
demanding from me a success to match their own.
This launch by Yahoo! today is a down-payment on the Korean judge’s
demand. Yahoo! has defined itself as the thin layer of the net that
will make the net’s community come alive. It’s first life made the net
findable. Its second life made the net useable. Now Yahoo! will give
the net tools to make its community come alive. The mix of extensions
announced this past week to an already fantastic base will transform
the Yahoo! community into the most exciting mix on the net. I am
extremely happy that our work can help make this commons grow.
It is hard to beat the excitement of these local
CC-launches. But the launch today does it. Creative Commons will
be just a piece — a component — designed to remove the uncertainty
around what creators mean. Yahoo! will gather this creativity into a
community. Our component helps people be clear about the freedoms they
intend to give, and the freedoms they can rely upon.
As weird as this may sound — I am extremely excited to be a
component, a plug-in, that will make it easy for the community of
creativity that Yahoo! has committed itself to to take off. It will be
the most important step in our project’s success. It is proof of the
kind of success Yahoo! will continue to be.
Larry Lessig
Great news ! Though there is a typo in the interface the options display “commerical” instead of commercial ;)
CC-Korea has not been successful in Korea. I think the Korean judge made a big mistake.
I suppose the judge sort of misjudged the situation.
Even though Korean people has a great interest on net culure and highly focusing to it, CCL is something Korean people don’t know well enough.
CC-Korea has just begun it’s first step. How come anyone can judge it’s success of failure? I don’t understand what made that Korean judge think it ’successful’.
To tell the truth, most of Korean bloggers who had shown sensitive reactions about CCL and CC-Korea showed – by posting their opinions in their own blogs – negative judgements about CC-Korea’s attitude so far. (Some of those bloggers were passionate enugh to voluntarily visit CC-Korea launching ceremony to know better about CCL and CC-Korea.)
Though I know it’s not possible, if we CAN tell CC-Korea’s success of failure in this very moment, it would not be that close to ’success’ for now.
Me gustaria que yahoo tuviera su blog en español. En relacion al nuevo buscador CC me parece maravilloso.
Personally, I think he is just not very fluent in English. I believe he would like to say “what will make CC-Korea as successful as CC in the world?” Who knows?
this is great news!! big up to the Yahoo CC search!